Gordon Whitman: Choose Citizenship

The latest sign of how fast U.S. immigration politics are changing came last week from House Republican leadership.

On Thursday, in her speech nominating John Boehner as speaker, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican Conference, surprised some people when she said that immigration reform would be one of the three top priorities of the House of Representatives.

The sea change in how politicians are talking about immigration actually began off-the-record when President Obama told the Des Moines Register that he'd get immigration reform done in his second term, since if he won re-election a big reason would be that Mitt Romney's anti-immigrant positions alienated Latino voters.

After that prophecy came true—Obama took 71 percent of the Latino vote, which rose to 10 percent of the electorate—a large number of influential Republicans took to the airways to say that their party needed to give up the idea of deporting 11 million people and embrace immigration reform if it wanted to have a future.

McMorris Rodger's comments make it clear that the drumbeat for reform has not ebbed.